> -----Original Message-----
> From: Steve Ross-Talbot [mailto:steve@enigmatec.net]
> Sent: Monday, November 10, 2003 6:27 AM
> To: public-ws-chor@w3.org
> Subject: What is the role of REST?
>
> What is the role or could be the role of REST for
> Choreography and vice-versa?
>
> Any REST'ers out there want to comment on this one?
>
> For those in the know would we want to bind a choreography to
> REST and so show that we are technology neutral?
I wouldn't worry about it too much. We've learned in the WSA group that
REST is a special, highly constrained case of SOA. SOAP 1.2 supports it to a
considerable extent out of the box and could be tweaked to support it more
fully by extending its HTTP binding. WSDL can be said to support it, at
least by the constructive proof that HTTP can be described by WSDL. So, if
one building on SOAP 1.2 and WSDL in the (implicit) context of WSA and SOA,
one can be RESTful by carefully constraining the operations being
choreographed.
This gets on much fuzzier ground, and the WSA group never could collectively
make a whole lot of sense out of it, but the RESTifarian notion of
choreography is to use the concept of "hypermedia as the engine of
application state." You might want to look at
http://www.markbaker.ca/2002/12/HypermediaWorkflow/ (written, IIRC, to
explain why this WG is not needed <grin>). Again, however, the core
argument seems to be that you can do RESTifarian choreography, and at worst
a choreography language doesn't add much. I personally disagree; without a
choreography language, how does the "engine" know how to perform a
particular sequence of GET/PUT/POST/DELETEs?
But be that as it may, I'm quite sure that any CDL based on SOAP 1.2 and
WSDL is sufficiently technology neutral to be RESTifarianically-correct *IF*
the choreography developer chooses to live within the REST constraints.